Patch reviews

Where to begin? Across the board, reporters and editors dealt with high school-esque, clique-ish behavior. With little to no oversight, that behavior had the potential to, and did at times, could become untenable. After the first couple of years, we began the steady move away from journalism to curated clickbait. We were told to hire "writers" from the community, many who had little-to-no journalism experience, but we couldn't afford professional freelancers, anyway. We were easily working 12-15 hour days regularly. If those hours had really been dedicated to journalism, I might still complain.. but I would see the value. Instead they were dedicated to creating identical, banal, vapid pieces of content dictated from HQ with no regard for the needs of our individual, local markets. We had no copy editors, and kids just out of college, who didn't know the difference between "its" and "it's," were editing final copy. It was a disaster, embarrassing, and worst of all, for those of us who considered ourselves journalists, we really did not have opportunity to learn or grow as professionals.

A few weeks ago, I had a stress dream about my former boss offering me a job at Patch, a higher title, more work and probably the same pay. I woke up and was immediately relieved to remember that we had all been let go at about the same time. When a company starts off with a 75% layoff, that shouldn't inspire confidence. Even before Hale took over, under AOL's tutelage, it was enough to turn me off journalism forever. Low pay, absurd expectations, stretching people thinner and thinner. I can't see a possible way for Hale to have taken the already unpleasant-to-live-through model AOL left behind, and made it at all tenable. Run. Run fast.